Modern global society has seen dramatic changes that throw us into impenetrable ethical problems of a kind never before witnessed in history. By this means, ethical problems constitute the locus of our confrontation with our own life situation. It is this condition that I take to be of fundamental importance when one undertakes to reflect upon the meaning of ethics today. If we approach the issue from the point of view of the history of ideas, we find that throughout the whole of the history of philosophy there have been a series of different attempts to articulate an ethics. Most of them address our concerns about how a human being ought to act in order to realise his or her life in the best or most correct way. I will return to the array of suggestions that have been offered in this regard. What is important for my purposes, meanwhile, is that there is some-thing that precedes ethical considerations, namely, the fact that ethics imposes itself upon the indi-vidual as a vital problem, and as one that cannot be escaped.

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From their beginning in the 1930s, critical theory and the Frankfurt school had their
focus on a critique of disturbed social relations in western society dominated by
totalitarian political regimes like Stalinism, Fascism, Nazism, and by capitalism as an
oppressive and destructive economic system and culture. Now, 80 years later, this
has all become history and thus it is time to leave the concept of critical theory behind
us, and instead bring the concept of critique to a broader theoretical framework like
hermeneutics. This allows the possibility of retaining the theoretical intentions of the
old Frankfurt school and at the same time there will be no boundaries by specific
dominant theoretical perspectives. In this paper, such a framework for a critical
hermeneutics is discussed on the basis of Weber’s, Gadamer’s, and Habermas’
theories on hermeneutics within the social sciences.